Monthly Archives: August 2010

A suicide bomber and gunmen wearing military uniforms attacked a hotel near Somalia’s presidential palace Monday, sparking a running gun battle with security forces. At least 32 people were killed, including six Somali parliamentarians.

The multi-pronged assault came less than 24 hours after the country’s most dangerous militant group — al-Shabab — threatened a “massive” war against what it labeled as invaders, a reference to the 6,000 African Union troops in Mogadishu.

Sheik Ali Mohamud Rage, a spokesman for the al-Shabab militia, said that members of the group’s “special forces” had carried out the attack against those “aiding the infidels.”

Militant veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars are believed to be helping train members of al-Shabab, which has links to al-Qaida. Tuesday’s assault is only the latest in a series of increasingly lethal attacks. Last month the group claimed responsibility for twin bombings during the World Cup final in Uganda’s capital, blasts that killed 76 people.

Al-Shabab said the attack was in retaliation for Uganda’s role in the African Union force in Mogadishu.

The ever-expanding list of U.S.-bred al Qaida operatives shows the terror group is trying to “flood the zone” of U.S. intelligence services to capitalize on what it considers a weakened America in the midst of a recession. This goal involves pushing forward an assortment of attacks and terror plots by lone wolves and poorly trained cells, experts say.

Al Qaida “has never claimed it could or would defeat the U.S. militarily. Instead, it seeks to wear us down economically through increasing expenditures on domestic security and overseas military commitments,” Georgetown University Professor Bruce Hoffman said in recent congressional testimony. “Given the current global economic downturn, this message arguably now has greater resonance with al Qaida’s followers and supporters and perhaps even with new recruits.”

The goal behind these activities is “to consume the attention of law enforcement and intelligence in the hopes that this distraction will permit more serious terrorist operations to go unnoticed and thereby sneak in ‘beneath the radar’ and succeed,” Hoffman said.

Al Qaida “and its Pakistani, Somali and Yemeni allies arguably have been able to accomplish the unthinkable: establishing at least an embryonic terrorist recruitment, radicalization and operational infrastructure in the United States with effects both at home and abroad,” Hoffman said.

A United States federal judge in southern California handed down a 70-month prison term on Monday to Hammad Riaz Samana, the fourth Muslim member of an anti-Jewish terrorist cell to be sentenced. Other members of the cell are serving up to 20 years in jail.

Samana and his co-conspirators planned to attack synagogues, the Israeli consulate in Los Angeles, El Al Airlines and military bases. They planned to attack on the dates of Jewish holidays in order to maximize casualties.

The Jami’yyat Ul-Islam Is-Shaheeh terrorist cell was headed by Kevin James and included Samana, Levar Haley Washington and Gregory Patterson. They carried out 11 armed robberies on gas stations and used the cash to buy weapons before being arrested four years ago. Investigators in Washington’s apartment found bulletproof vests, knives, Jihad literature and lists of potential targets.

Washington is serving 22 years in jail, while James was sentenced to 16 years and Patterson was sentenced to 12.5 years. Judge Cormac Carney acknowledged that the 70-month jail sentence was lighter than the terms handed to other members of the cell and explained that he took into account the terrorist’s mental condition.

Samana, a native of Pakistan and a U.S. national, had conducted computer research to hit targets and was the getaway driver in at least one of the robberies. He was recruited at a mosque in Los Angeles.

Like this:

The soon-to-be constructed Ground Zero mosque has generated a lot of controversy. There seems to be a general level of confusion as to what this is all about.

There shouldn’t be.

The Ground Zero mosque is about Islamic supremecism and conquest. It’s really quite that simple–and this is not a new phenomenon, as evidenced by these videos posted on YouTube by an individual going by the alias “mujahadeen911.”

Relief workers in Pakistan say that Islamist charities affiliated with terrorist groups are competing with international efforts to provide relief to the millions of Pakistanis affected by massive floods.

“Charities affiliated with militant groups, especially LeT [Lashkar-e-Taiba], have always exploited such crises, and this one is no different,” a humanitarian aid worker in Pakistan said on the condition of anonymity, citing security concerns.

The U.S. designated Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) a foreign terrorist organization in December 2001.

Soon after LeT was branded a terrorist group, its founder, Hafiz Mohammed Saeed, changed the group’s name to Jamaat-ud-Dawa (JuD), which began humanitarian projects to avoid restrictions.

LeT coordinates its charitable activities through JuD and Falah-i-Insaniat Foundation, which spearheaded humanitarian relief to the victims of the October 2005 earthquake in Pakistan-controlled Kashmir and is said to be active on the ground once again.

We truly hope that Andrew McCarthy becomes attorney general of the US one day. The man isn’t just incredibly smart, he’s also totally focused on the war that the Jihadists are waging against the West.

He has written two excellent books on the subject.

In fact, McCarthy was going after Jihadists long before it was “cool” to go after Jihadists.

When he was a federal prosecutor, he even got a conviction of the “Blind Sheikh” for sedition under the Smith Act. There isn’t anyone in the current Justice Department with the intellectual capacity , motivation or wherewithal to even pursue such convictions now.

McCarthy now writes regularly for National Review and he published an extremely important article yesterday about CAIR (Council for American Islamic Relations), a front for the Muslim Brotherhood with ties to HAMAS.

If anyone needed any evidence that CAIR is tied to HAMAS, they can find it in the form of a FBI surveillance audio tape of CAIR leaders. McCarthy details the contents of that tape in a recent National Review article:

A Kenyan Muslim who once admitted that he was part of a planned Al Qaeda operation to blow up the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi is now facing charges in connection with last month’s Al Qaeda attacks in Uganda but is free on bail.

Salmin Mohammed Khamis, 34, also was acquitted in 2005 in the bombing of a beachfront hotel frequented by Israeli tourists, two years after he divulged the embassy plot. Khamis was never even charged in connection with the embassy case, despite his confession.

He was one of seven people acquitted in the 2002 Islamikaze bombing of an Israeli-owned hotel near Mombasa, Kenya in which 15 people were killed. He also was acquitted of charges in connection with a failed attempt to shoot down an Israeli passenger plane with a SA-7 man-portable surface to air missile that same day.

Abdulhakim Mohammed, previously known as Carlos Bledsoe before his conversion to Islam in 2004, who is charged with murdering one US Army soldier and wounding another outside a Little Rock armed forces recruiting center last summer, now says he tried but failed to carry out additional Jihadist terror attacks in the southern U.S.

This revelation came in a report filed in July by an Arkansas state doctor who examined Mohammed, declaring him mentally fit to stand trial.

Mohammed claims to have tried to use a Molotov Cocktail to firebomb the home of an Orthodox rabbi in Nashville, Tennessee.

He also claims to have plotted an attack on a US Army recruiting center in Florence, Kentucky, but didn’t–only because it was closed when he got there.

Mohammed has a history of violence and, sometime after his conversion to Islam, he started to consider himself a soldier of allah.

He was reportedly angry about the actions of US soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. He believed they had desecrated the Quran and sought revenge.

One of his targets was a house in Nashville, where he thought an Orthodox Jewish rabbi lived. It turns out that the rabbi had moved out of the house a year earlier and, at any rate, the Molotov Cocktail that Mohammad threw at one of the windows failed to break the glass and set fire to the house.

This botched Nashville firebombing was actually the first phase in a three state Jihad tour that ended when he shot the two Army soldiers in Little Rock, killing Pvt. William Long and wounding Pvt. Quinton Ezeagwula.

Until the Arkansas court released the medical report recently, the former Tennessee State University student’s botched Nashville firebomb attack and aborted assault on the Florence, Kentucky, Army recruiting station were not public knowledge.

The rabbi targeted was Rabbi Saul Strosberg, who says he doesn’t know why he was a target, having never met Mohammed.

“The fact that it made sense in his mind to kill a rabbi is just nuts,” he said.

We are frankly incredulous at the good rabbi’s naivete. It wasn’t that Mohammed was “nuts” at all. He is a Jihadist who went to Yemen for terrorist training and he was merely doing what he had been trained to do.

That is the reality and we all better wake up to that fact.

Mohammed has told the court he wants to plead guilty, but he can’t under state law because he faces the death penalty.

A Memphis native, Mohammed moved to Yemen in 2007 supposedly to teach English and became involved with Jihadist terrorists. While in Yemen he was arrested for trying to go to Somalia to fight in the Jihad there, was jailed for a short time and then deported to the United States in 2009.

Why he was allowed to roam free back here in the USA after having tried to join the Jihad is a question worth asking…

“This was a Jihadi attack on the infidel forces. That didn’t go as planned,” Mohammed wrote in a letter to the court.

Two Muslim Americans are under arrest and 12 other individuals, including five Islamic U.S. citizens, have been charged with acts of terrorism that include providing money, personnel, and other material support to the Somali-based terrorist organization al Shabaab.

Results of an FBI-led global investigation were announced this week at Department of Justice headquarters in Washington, where indictments were unsealed charging individuals in Minnesota, Alabama, and California. Twelve of the 14 under indictment are fugitives believed to be in Somalia, demonstrating the weakness of treating Jihad as if it was a law enforcement issue and not war.

These indictments and arrests shed further light on a deadly pipeline that has routed funding and Islamic Jihadists to al Shabaab from the Muslim community in cities across America.

The US government designated Somalia-based al Shabaab a terrorist organization in 2008. The group has ties to al Qaeda and has made numerous public statements threatening to attack the United States and its citizens.

Jihadist terrorist organizations such as al Shabaab continue to recruit U.S. citizens from Muslim communities in the U.S. and elsewhere to train and wage Jihad and to provide support for their Jihadist terrorism.

The two Jihadists arrested this week—females who were naturalized U.S. citizens and residents of Minnesota—have been charged with raising money to support al Shabaab through door-to-door solicitations and teleconferences in Somali Muslim communities in Minnesota and other locations in the U.S. and Canada. The Justice Department claims that in some cases, funds were raised under the false pretense that they would be used to help the poor, but it is just as likely that the fundraisers were simply asking for zakat donations, which can go to Islamic charities, the poor and any of 8 approved destinations under Shariah law. One of those approved destinations is to those “fighting in the way of allah.” We can only hope that the Justice Department has a better understanding of zakat than their statement indicates.

The other indicted Jihadists—mostly young men—were charged with leaving the U.S. to join al Shabaab in Somalia.

Joint Terrorism Task Forces in Minneapolis, Mobile, and San Diego played a particularly significant role in this investigation, illustrating how widespread and far-reaching the threat of Jihad in America has become.

In Minnesota alone, between September 2007 and October 2009, at least 20 Muslim men traveled from Minneapolis to Somalia for al Shabaab terrorist training. Many of them ultimately fought for the Muslim terrorist group against Ethiopian forces, African Union troops, and the weak, transitional government there. At least one man from Minneapolis went on to become the first known U.S. citizen suicide bomber.

These individuals are wanted for providing material support to the Somalia-based Islamic Jihadist terrorist organization al-Shabaab.

As if we needed any more evidence of the enemy in our midst, we have fresh reports that 35-year old Adnan Shukrijumah, pictured in this post, has now taken an operational leadership role in Al Qaeda.

Shukrijumah has an “interesting” background. Born in Saudi Arabia, Shukrijumah moved with his family to the United States when he was a teenager. He grew up in Florida, where his mother still lives. His father was an Imam and reportedly on the Saudi government payroll, no doubt for Islamic dawa operations in Florida.

Shukrijumah attended Broward Community College in Broward County, Florida, but it is not entirely clear when he joined Al Qaeda. He has been among the FBI’s most wanted terrorists for years.

The fact that he has evidently elevated to a high level operational position in Al Qaeda suggests that Al Qaeda could once again be focusing on planning attacks in the USA…